Pros: - Up to 16 SATA drives supported
- Good price for the quality and number of ports

Cons: - Does not come with the SFF-8087 mini-SAS cabling
- Documentation is a little ambiguous for the newbie to LSI products
- Some motherboards the BIOS will override/disable some chipset SATA ports due to boot conflicts -- I had no problems, I disabled the boot functionality of the HBA in the LSI firmware and no issues.

Other Thoughts: Using this card to control drives for a FreeNAS build and it works great with the FreeNAS drivers. Caveat, FreeNAS 9.3.X at the time of this review requires the card to be flashed to version P20 firmware. Flashing this card can be done several ways, and some of the documentation on the Avago (LSI) support site is a bit confusing to someone new to the Avago (LSI) products. A little googling and I had no problems, took about 15 minutes. I did it through the EFI shell and script (downloadable from the Avago website). I would highly recommend this product to anyone who needs a lot of drives for a ZFS file system, particularly FreeNAS -- completely stable.

Pros: LSI products are usually very reliable and well constructed.

Cons: This Adapter will work just fine IF only 3 of the 4 ports have drives attached. However, no matter what I did to try and get it to function in Windows Server 2008 R2 environment, once that 4th drive array cable was attached, it would not boot any further. To bad, since otherwise it seemed OK. I suspect that there was an upper memory conflict with the other hardware reserved space on the computer, and it just couldn't get past it. Incidentally, a pair of HighPoint Rocket (NOT RocketRAID) SGL2720 adapters, with a total of four (4) SATA 3 Ports = 16 drives, did work just fine - so go figure?

Other Thoughts: Newegg accepted a return for this incompatible product for a full refund. So all is well that ends well.

Pros: Inexpensive, No RAID, Just HBA. Works great with FreeNAS. Worked right out of the box, no configuring necessary.

Cons: None, so far.

Other Thoughts: I'd buy another one if I needed it.

Pros: Works perfect. Been running between 12 to 20 drives on it for about 2 months. Called LSI for info on booting issue and they knew how to fix it in like 30 seconds.

Cons: none yet

Other Thoughts: People are saying that they can't boot from local SATA ports. After I added 8 drives I also had this problem and when I called LSI they talked me thru going in the LSI config and setting it to not look at the LSI controller for the boot and that fixed it right up.

Pros: 16 hard drives on one card, simple setup (windows 7 took care of it all before I even put in the driver disc)

Cons: Expensive

Other Thoughts: We use this in a high end pc based DVR. We currently have 13 storage drives, all of which connect through this single LSI card. We got 4 of the 3ware CBL-SFF8087OCF-05M (available here on Newegg) cables to break out the 4 SFF-8087 ports to 16 sata connections.

Pros: Compatible with ESXi 5.5
Compatible with IOMMU to a Win2k12 VM
16 Hard drives capable out the box
Compatible with 2+ TB hard drives
0 problems setting up on my GA-990FXA-UD5P
MegaRaid storage software allows you to easily update bios and firmware within Windows.

Cons: Expensive
The box it came in looked like it had been previously opened, but the anti-static bag was fully intact.

Other Thoughts: I had a couple of old LSI MegaRaid cards that weren't able to recognize drives larger than 2TB. They also didn't allow JBOD. You would have to setup single drives as RAID 0 arrays. This card solved all my problems, and allowed me to consense down to just 1 card.

Pros: I recently decided to go a little crazy with my NAS and picked up two of these cards. I tested these cards in a Windows 7, Server 2012, and Debian Linux environment and they worked flawlessly in all of them. I get SMART data from all 24 of my drives, they all spin up, and worked without any firmware updates.

I have 24 Western Digital 5TB RED hard drives in a RAID 10. RAID benchmarks performed on the system are as follows:
Cached read: 10GBps (80Gbps)
Buffered read: 4GBps (32Gbps)
Write speed: 3GBps (24Gbps)

Cons: None so far, will update if any are encountered later on.

Other Thoughts: I debated between picking up this and the dedicated RAID controller version however with how far software RAID has come and the setup I had it was better to just pick up these controllers and do a simple software RAID. I've noticed no lack of performance between sofware vs hardware raid since I set this up. I have 12 drives hooked up to one card and another 12 drives hooked up to the second card with no RAID issues at all.

Other reviews mentioned it disabled their SATA ports and other issues. I have experienced none of those issues.

Pros: Works with Freebsd right out of the box. No docs needed...ie no brainer to figure out.

Cons: Some reviews seem to be written by people who rate their tech level higher than it really is. I almost didn't buy this card.

Pros: It's a simple HBA, no bells or whistles. The price point is fantastic! Performs great.

Cons: None

Other Thoughts: This is the HBA that I've been looking for for a long time. I use ZFS for file servers (generally on FreeBSD or with FreeNAS), and this HBA is perfect for that. It's a straight HBA; no RAID on the card. With some RAID controllers you have to make a RAID0 for each of your drives you want to pass through. With this controller, it's literally plug and play.

Performance is fantastic, as expected from LSI. If you need to build a file server with software RAID (ie, ZFS or Windows Storage Spaces), this is THE controller to get!

Pros: This card just... works, and works well. I should have spent a little more and got this card instead of going cheap with my previous solution. You get what you pay for, and it's worth every penny.

Cons: Passive heat sink gets VERY hot (like it will burn you after a few seconds), with no airflow (open case, or neutral case pressure). The card expects a certain amount of negative pressure inside the case to draw air from the back, over the heat sink. If you're a builder like me that aims for slight positive pressure (to keep dust out of all the cracks and crevices), you're likely going to cook this card to the point of failure. LSI should have included a fan in this design, IMHO, though I cut them some slack as this card is meant to be in a server with very high airflow.

Other Thoughts: My solution to the heat issue was very simple. I got a very quiet (14dBA) 40mm fan (5cfm), and a couple sheet metal screws at just the right depth and diameter, and attached it directly to the heat sink, slightly offset from the center of the die. The heat sink is barely warm with this low CFM fan, with the case open (thus no airflow). I connected it to one of my fan controllers, not to slow it down, but to sound an alarm if the fan fails.

I have 4x SAS to SATA breakout cables controlling 15 drives in 3x 5-in-3 drive cages. I'm able to sustain over 800MB/sec minimum, with 1.5GB/sec peaks, and I have slow drives.

Make sure you install it in an 8x PCIe slot, and that your mobo isn't dropping the 8x slot to a 4x slot due to other cards using up the lanes.